IREC 2026 10k ft launch with a N-Class KNSB motor
We launched a 10k ft apogee rocket powered by our Student Developed And Researched (SRAD) N3630 KNSB motor on June 20 at IREC. The rocket reached an apogee of 9463 ft overshooting by only 2% of OpenRocket's predicted apogee of 9272 ft. The maximum speed attained was 302 m/s, roughly mach 0.87.
The airframe was 150 mm diameter, 292 cm tall, made with 3 sections of GFRP tubes with CF fins which were laid up tip to tip.
The first image is the captured by the on-board cam at apogee, 2nd shows assembled rocket (without motor), 3rd one is the motor and 4th one is the avionics bay. Here's the on-board footage from our instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DaI_1eOz-NZ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
The camera was rpi-cam with rpi zero 2 w which was last minute solution as we couldn't find cheap reliable camera at that moment. I mostly worked on the avionics part. We had our custom SRAD avionics system which triggered the ejection events for the parachutes along with a redundant commercial altimeter. The SRAD avionics system had an additional pitot tube system and strain gauge system for fins along with standard requirements like GPS and Telemetry. Unfortunately, due to an ADC fault, the pitot tube data was stale. For this flight the strain gauge was unused.